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The sky is blue, the Hudson River flows south, and bonds are a hopeless investment.

If you have been reading the financial press in recent months, you would swear that the part about bonds was just as certain as the other two points. But market reality in recent weeks, as it often does, has confounded the conventional wisdom.

As a CNNMoney piece points out, bond yields, instead of going up and depressing bond values, have actually been falling lately. The yield on the 10-year Treasury is trading at about 2.85%, down from 2.97% at the end of 2013.

I just checked Morningstar and noticed that the
Pimco Total Return Fund
(ticker: PTTPX), the largest U.S. bond mutual fund in assets, has gained 0.4% in the past month after losing 2.0% last year. So comparing Pimco to the Titanic seems a bit premature at this point.

CNNMoney

Moreover, as CNNMoney points out, in the first week of January investors put nearly $2.7 billion into mutual funds that invest in bonds, according to the Investment Companies Institute. "It was the first time investors had put more money into bonds since late May." Bond exchange-traded funds have also experienced strong inflows.

By contrast, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is down more than 1% for the year, and the S&P 500 is also slightly lower.

To be sure, it's hard to imagine bonds generating total returns much beyond the low single digits this year. But the Titanic talk may be overdone.

Meanwhile, anyone with an interest in shares of
FacebookFB -1.1779554059739168%Facebook Inc. Cl AU.S.: NasdaqUSD82.215
-0.98-1.1779554059739168%
/Date(1427835600246-0500)/
Volume (Delayed 15m)
:
19145238AFTER HOURSUSD82.289
0.07399999999999810.09000790609986012%
Volume (Delayed 15m)
:
563016
P/E Ratio
73.40625Market Cap
232863799605.182
Dividend Yield
N/ARev. per Employee
1355150More quote details and news »FBinYour ValueYour ChangeShort position
(FB) should check out a short piece on Yahoo! Finance that refers to a Princeton University study predicting the "rapid decline" in Facebook activity in the next few years.

According to the Yahoo! Finance piece, "the researchers used MySpace as a case study for a social network whose use spread rapidly, like a disease, and then quickly died out when the number of new users declined. The study finds that Facebook is 'just beginning to show the onset of an abandonment phase.' The researchers believe that abandonment will accelerate to the point that Facebook could lose 80% of its [current] users between 2015 and 2017."

Yahoo! Finance

The report also highlights the high valuations placed on social-networking companies such as Facebook and
TwitterTWTR 0.38083784325516135%Twitter Inc.U.S.: NYSEUSD50.08
0.190.38083784325516135%
/Date(1427835700441-0500)/
Volume (Delayed 15m)
:
23626889AFTER HOURSUSD50.21
0.1300000000000030.2595846645367412%
Volume (Delayed 15m)
:
227284
P/E Ratio
N/AMarket Cap
32320586292.2138
Dividend Yield
N/ARev. per Employee
385652More quote details and news »TWTRinYour ValueYour ChangeShort position
(TWTR). "Again, pointing to the experience of MySpace, the researchers highlight the fact that News Corp. bought MySpace for $580 million in 2005 during its rapid growth phase, only to sell it at a steep loss for $35 million in 2011."

But this notion that Facebook could succumb to a "disease" doesn't sit well with Michael Santoli, a Yahoo! Finance columnist. Santoli, who admits that he isn't on Facebook himself, argues that "enthusiasm for Facebook will wane, but usage will not."

He compared future Facebook use to that of Microsoft Windows and Outlook as examples of everyday-use products that may not have the cache of whatever the latest social-networking darling may be, but are a part of user habits. "Nobody has enthusiasm for Windows and Outlook but it's still there," he says.

I'll close with an article that plays off the latest yearly return data on an asset class that few Americans have ever seriously considered—American farmland.

Last year, according to Pension & Investments website, farmland returned 20.9%, its highest annual return since it posted a 21.2% return in 2006, according to National Council on Real Estate Investment Fiduciaries (NCREIF). Last year's return on the NCREIF's farmland index was up 2.33 percentage points from a year ago, with the total return split between appreciation (11.5%) and income (8.7%).

What's truly remarkable about farmland is that it has returned more than 15% annually in eight of the past 10 years. And in that time, it hasn't suffered a down year, even during the period when residential real estate plummeted from 2007 through 2009.

Perhaps the best-known farmland investor is former Scion Capital Group fund manager Michael Burry, whose highly successful credit-default swap trades in advance of the housing collapse were featured in Michael Lewis' book The Big Short.

Any investment that wins over Burry, a brilliant investor, should be of interest to the rest of us. But the biggest selling point to farmland are the consistent returns.